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Paul Fletcher discusses Mobile Black Spots on ABC South West WA Breakfast
HOST: You find yourself having to walk a few hundred metres, climb a fence and stand on a fence post just to find mobile reception at your place these days? It’s well known that there are number of mobile black spots in the south west, the problem that even received attention in the Keelty report in the Margret River Fires, but what do we do? The Federal government earlier this year announced $100 million dollar mobile phone black spot program, and this week marks the closing date for people to nominate locations for attention, but who can nominate, and what happens if you are successful? Paul Fletcher is the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Communications and he joins us this morning. Good morning Mr Fletcher.
PAUL FLETCHER:
Good morning
HOST:
As I said the South West has a number of black spots, how will this program help?
PAUL FLETCHER:
Well the Abbott government announced a $100 million program to improve mobile coverage in regional and remote Australia, and the first thing we are doing is seeking nominations from people all around the country for locations that don’t have mobile coverage today and need it. The closing date, as you said, is the end of this week for those nominations. The next thing that will happen is that we will have a competitive selection process, which will be starting reasonably soon, in which the three mobile carries; Optus, Telstra, Vodafone; and potentially a couple of specialist infrastructure builders as well will be invited to lodge bids to build base stations, and they will need to draw those from the list of sites that have been nomination around Australia.
HOST:
Now you make a point there in saying that they are going to bid for it, who can bid for it, is it individual people, I’ve got an example here of someone who sent me a text saying “I’m using a $700 booster to send this text”, could they possibly say, alright I would like to nominate?
PAUL FLETCHER:
They can certainly nominate their location, and the easiest way to do that is the send an email to [email protected], and so then what happens is that goes into the list, we have got around 4000 locations around Australia that have been nominated at the moment, obviously we won’t be able to solve all of them, so the intention, or the objective is to solve the areas of greatest need, and we expect that with this $100 million, together with the amount of money we expect to leverage out of the mobile carriers through the competitive selection process, we expect we would be able to provide coverage in 250 – 300 locations around the country, and certainly in terms of South West WA, both Rick Wilson as the member for O’Connor and Nola Marino as the member for Forest have been very strong advocates for the needs of their communities in terms of improved coverage and indeed in early April I visited both electorates, Rick Wilson convened a community meeting in Manjimup where we had a good discussion, and similarly Nola Marino convened a community meeting in Capel.
HOST:
If we take a step back though, if that person does nominate, that is just one voice in a sea of voices, are you looking for a number of people from individual communities to get on board and say ‘Alright, we are representing our community, and we really need to do something here’, rather than just individuals sending through emails?
PAUL FLETCHER:
Well there are a couple of aspects to it, certainly the more people who nominate a location the better, I guess in terms of communicating the intensity of the need. But it is also a good idea to be engaging with your local members of Parliament to ensure that the location you think is important is on their radar screen. As I’ve mentioned both Rick Wilson and Nola Marino have been very strong advocates for improved mobile coverage in the South West, and the intention behind this program is so there is public money going in, we intend, as I say, to secure some funding from the mobile carriers as well towards improved mobile coverage, now curiously , under the previous government there was not $1 of public money that went in to improved mobile coverage, even though the strong message that we get in government is that for people living outside of the capital cities, mobile coverage is a really important issue, and I’ve had the opportunity to visit over fifty communities around Australia in the past month talking about the issue of mobile coverage and people talk very passionately about the importance of mobile coverage for education, for emergency response, and for doing business for tourism and so on.
HOST:
Mr Fletcher you mentioned there that emergencies and those sort of things – isn’t it more important that the government – ok you’ve got this black spot program going – but here in the south west, we are subject to emergencies, we are subject to bushfires, and it has been pointed out that in Keelty report and other reports as well, that during times of bushfire and emergency, mobile phone coverage has been lacking at best. Shouldn’t the government just take some leadership and say the south west is a bit different, we need to spend some money there and we need to spend it now?
PAUL FLETCHER:
The emergency issue is a very important one and it has been certainly raised with me in the meetings we had in the south west as well as in the other parts of Australia, and people make the point that when you have a system to push out emergency warnings on SMS, that’s a very good thing, but of course if you don’t have mobile coverage, you don’t get those messages. So it is very important that we improve mobile coverage all over Australia, including the South West. Now the three mobile carriers are spending a lot of money each year expanding their network but there are always going to be areas which need coverage but they won’t get to anytime soon due to the particular business rules they use, which is why we decided to allocate public money to this, with the view to identifying the communities where there is the greatest need and allocating this money so we can make the best possible difference around Australia, including of course in the South West of WA.
HOST:
Paul Fletcher thank you very much for your time this morning.
PAUL FLETCHER:
Thank you
HOST:
Paul Fletcher MP, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Communications, if you’d like to nominate your area, your community for some of the money from this $100 million mobile black spot program, the email address is [email protected].
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